Archive for the ‘Man’ Category

December 3, 2009 4

The Predicament of the Modern Subject (Taylor)

By Robert Minto in Epistemology, Man

Having some free time this evening, I took the opportunity to begin reading Charles Taylor’s Hegel. I found his set up of Hegel’s context immensely interesting—especially as a coherent jumping-off point for further thought. Taylor asserts that Hegel’s whole philosophy is—put most economically—a vast attempt to solve a problem of “the nature of human subjectivity [...]

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November 28, 2009 0

Astronomy and Alienation: Preliminary Thoughts

By Robert Minto in Astronomy, Man, Time

Next semester I’ll be taking my “lab science” : astronomy. I love the fact that my lab involves staring at stars. But more than that, I’m fascinated by the development of the meaning of the study of astronomy. I hope to study and write about that; but even now, before it has become a conscious [...]

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September 7, 2009 0

Miracles, the Allowable Duality, and Personhood

By Robert Minto in Creation, Man, Miracles, Mystery

The “reformational” thought rampant at Dordt demonizes, among other things, “dualisms.” This term of opprobrium extends, in reformational thought, to things like body/soul, work/worship, nature/grace, etc. But two dualities are endorsed: God/Creation, and Good/Evil.
Sometimes thinkers in this tradition point to a “supernaturalistic view of miracles” as an example of an improper dualism. This line of [...]

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September 4, 2009 0

Busyness & Human Nature

By Robert Minto in Man, Organization, Strategy

Pannenberg has been teaching me the past few days about human nature, via his remarkable book Anthropology in Theological Perspective. In the first section of the book, in which he surveys some recent developments in the notion of humanities’ uniqueness in nature, he introduced me for the first time to “human openness to the world.” [...]

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July 27, 2009 1

Self-help from the 2nd Century A.D.

By Robert Minto in Blogging, Books, Man, Strategy, Virtue

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote a fabulous book that we simply call Meditations.
Authorities tend to denigrate this book. Some have called it contradictory. The best that can often be managed in its favor is this: it’s the best representation we have of the basic tenets of Stoicism. And as everybody knows, “Stoicism” functions mainly [...]

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July 11, 2009 0

Patience: A Moral Strategy*

By Robert Minto in Man, Strategy, Virtue

Things that improve with practice: concentration, geniality, memory, humility, confidence in public, steadiness in self-discipline, getting up with the alarm, putting in a full day’s work, loving, thinking, noticing, and every mental, physical, and emotional skill. The vital characteristic that sustains steady practice is patience.
What is patience? Patience is the firm place in the center, [...]

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June 29, 2009 0

The Gatekeeper as Anti-autobiography

By Robert Minto in Books, Criticism, Man, Politics, Rhetoric

In his book The Gatekeeper, in the midst of a discussion of “anti-philosophers,” Terry Eagleton throws out the following sentence.
… anti-autobiography means not just not writing your autobiography, an astonishly prevalent practice, but writing it in such a way as to outwit the prurience and immodesty of the genre by frustrating your own desire for [...]

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June 10, 2009 0

Repentance & Hope: The Significance of Mankind

By Robert Minto in Eschatology, Hope, Man, Repentance

A great agony of Christian thinking has been the ambiguity of the question how much importance should we assign to mankind, its destiny, and its works? A thousand small incarnations of this ambiguity have embroiled our thinkers in skirmishes with each other. I’d like to commentate on the possibilities for repentance and hope within this [...]

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